Acuity enhancement

Visual acuity enhancement by StingrayZ - This animation serves as a replication of visual acuity enhancement, which is a common psychedelic effect. It demonstrates the general differences between normal vision and acuity enhancement by shifting between the two states. There is also a subtle amount of visual drifting within this replication.

Acuity enhancement is defined as a heightening of the clearness and clarity of vision. This results in the visual details of the external environment becoming sharpened to the point where the edges of objects become perceived as extremely focused, clear, and defined. The experience of acuity enhancement can be likened to bringing a camera or projector lens that was slightly blurry into focus. At its highest level, a person may experience the ability to observe and comprehend their entire visual field simultaneously, including their peripheral vision. This is in contrast to the default sober state where a person is only able to perceive the small area of central vision in detail.[1]

While under the influence of this effect, it is common for people to suddenly notice patterns and details in the environment they may have never previously noticed or appreciated. For example, the complexity and perceived beauty of the visual input often become apparent when looking at sceneries, nature, and everyday textures.

Image examples

Analysis

It is thought that a fundamental feature of information-processing dysfunction in both hallucinogen-induced states and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders is the inability of these people to screen out, inhibit, filter, or gate irrelevant stimuli and to attend selectively to more important features of the environment.[4][5][6]

The CSTC model of the brain posits that the thalamus plays a key role in controlling or gating external sensory information to the conscious faculties and is thereby fundamentally involved in the regulation of a person's awareness and attention.[7][8][9][10] The interruption of psychedelics to these neural pathways that inhibit the sensory gating systems[11][10] may, therefore, result in an enhanced availability of sensory information which is usually filtered out by these systems. This process is likely also involved in the various visual, tactile, and auditory enhancements which commonly occur when under the influence of a psychedelic experience.

↑"Preliminary evidence of an association between sensorimotor gating and distractibility in psychosis". The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. 8 (1): 60–66. 1996. doi:10.1176/jnp.8.1.60. ISSN0895-0172.